Let There Be Light!
by Linda J G
Summary: A bit of insanity to save my sanity while I write and research some nonfiction. Trouble finds Rimmer... and when one of the Posse is facing the heat, can the others be far behind? Please read, enjoy, review. Thanks!
1. Chapter 1

No ownership of the Red Dwarf characters is implied or inferred. Copyright belongs to others and no infringement is intended. If it was intended, I wouldn't be posting here, now would I, where I could be caught red-handed by anyone who wanted to find me….

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Arnold Judas Rimmer was a hologram.

He'd forget that sad fact once in awhile—like when he was listening to his _Greatest Hammond Organ Hits_ records, or flipping casually—well, obsessively, really—through his collection of photographs of twentieth century telegraph poles. But that little self-deception was short-lived: when he wanted to change records, or turn the page of the photo album, he'd have to ask Holly to do it for him. "Turn," he must have said thirty-seven times last night, the last time he took refuge in his telegraph poles. _Ohhh_, there was the Morse 1750. That was always a nice one. Tall, strong, proud. Beautiful. Unconquerable. Arnold could be like that. There was another shot of it on the next page. Lost in his fantasy, Rimmer reached out to turn to the next image.

And his hand went right through the book.

Scowling because his brain had played a cruel trick on him, letting him feel so _normal_ for a moment that he tried to attempt the impossible, Rimmer threw an irritated look up at the screen on the wall. "Turn," he ordered impatiently, and then he waited.

"Okay, Arnold," the blonde head of the ship's computer replied. She didn't bother remarking on Rimmer's foul mood. If she responded every time the mining ship _Red Dwarf_'s ex-Second Technician and chief chicken soup machine de-gunker spoke rudely to her, she'd be going on longer than it took a politician to get to his point. No, she decided today, just easier to let him get on with it.

The page turned. Rimmer concentrated on the Morse 1750. Stared at it. Tried to become one with it. Tried to imagine himself as tall, strong, proud, like that Western Red Cedar. But in his mind all he could see was a matchstick—and a burnt-out one, at that. "Oh—_never mind_," he dismissed the attempt aloud irritably. He stood up and walked away from the book, his eyes alighting on some of his favorite cut-out phrases. _Arnie's Number One. Rimmer Does It Best._ He did it best, all right, he thought, taking quick, angry strides out of his quarters. He made a mess of his life—and his _death_—better than anyone else he knew.

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Dave Lister, the last human, was the lowest ranking person on _Red Dwarf_—or the highest ranking, if you didn't count Rimmer, who was dead, after all, and did a dead man really get to outrank a living human being? Yes, Lister was a human being, no matter how often Rimmer tried to convince him otherwise. To Cat, the life form evolved from his pregnant stray Frankenstein, the feline to whom Lister indirectly owed his life since he wouldn't turn her into the ship's Captain and so ended up in stasis when the radiation leak aboard _Red Dwarf_ happened and killed everyone else aboard—Rimmer included—Lister was even God, the one who protected the Holy Mother and promised to take all the cats to Fuschal—er, Fiji. So no, the number of curries eaten by this Scouse bloke did not remove him from the running as a human. He had merely proven that it _was_ possible for a person to eat eleven hot curries, each with two pints of wicked strength lager, and still get up in the morning. As long as you included in the definition of "up" kneeling in front of the bog, puking your guts out and vowing never to touch another curry for the rest of your life.

That was a whole week ago, however, and Lister was just starting to warm up to the idea of a bit of madras sauce on his cornflakes dinner when Rimmer walked into their quarters, walked straight over to his bunk, and laid down, crossing his arms behind his head, saying nothing.

"Hey, you're just in time, Rimmer," Lister said, already warming up to make the hologram's life just a little more miserable. After all, that's why Rimmer had been the one person whose presence had been resurrected—to keep Lister sane. And what could be saner than trying to drive someone else crazy? "I'm about to experiment with a new combination: chutney, chili and madras sauce with just a sprinkling of curry powder in a pint of lager. You want some?"

Rimmer's ex-stomach curled at the idea. He suspected, somehow, that Lister's did, too. But that wouldn't stop him from actually going through with it, just to make Rimmer sick. "People who drink _that_ concoction should be in freak show booths at the circus." A beat. "Bottoms up."

Lister grinned to himself; he'd gotten Rimmer rolling in just _one_ sentence! _Brutal!_ "It wouldn't hurt _you_ to take a few chances every now and then, Rimmer," he said, resigning himself to the cornflakes and madras sauce with a lager chaser. "Otherwise at the end of your life you'll look back and say, 'I should've, I could've, I would've."

"I'm already _at_ the end of my life," Rimmer reminded him. "Didn't you notice the big H on my forehead? I'm dead. I'm deceased. I only exist because Holly projects me. What else could I should've, could've, would've?"

"Breathe?"

Lister laughed lightly, half-heartedly hiding it from Rimmer. He knew the whole death thing bothered his bunkmate. But as he'd told him before, death wasn't the handicap it used to be. You could still go out and do really good things. Most holograms did, really—well, except for Horace Binglebaum, who went right back to what he'd been doing when he got flattened by a steamroller—being a meter maid.

"Go ahead, Lister: laugh. Someday you'll know exactly what it feels like." Rimmer paused as the irony of the words struck him. "Or _doesn't_."

"I'm not worried, Rimmer," Lister answered, shoving a spoonful of cornflakes in his mouth. "I'm gonna go out with a bang."

"Everyone on _Red Dwarf_ already did that; _your_ 'plop' won't be anything special. The drive plate exploded, and when the radiation came out _everyone_ went BANG and turned to dust!"

"I was speakin' metaphorically," Lister said through his cornflakes.

"That's your trouble," Rimmer answered, sitting up. The lights in the room started to flicker. "You're always talking in fantasy land. You never—" Lister kept eating as Rimmer's tirade faded in and out of his ears. "—with your smegging grin and—"

The voice stopped. The lights remained out. Lister's spoon paused halfway to his mouth. "Holly, what's going on?" he asked. He looked toward where he expected the ship's computer to be looking back out at him.

"I don't know, Dave; the power is fine. All the generators are working."

"Well, I can't see _you_. And why don't we have any lights?"

"We _do_," the computer insisted. "According to the data, the only bulb out on the entire ship is that tiny one that comes on in the linen closet when you open the door, in case you're too embarrassed to have anyone know you have to get the rubber mattress protector out again in the middle of the night."

"Heyyyyyyyyyyyy," came a voice that sounded almost like a purr, but not exactly, since most purrs weren't in the tenor range. "What are you monkeys doing with the lights? I was right in the middle of my evening preen, and now I can't see my mirror The Cat, a tall, dark, smooth-moving creature that could almost have been mistaken for human, only he was more vain than a Latino rock star, and had slightly longer fangs than most people outside of Transylvania liked to admit to having, edged further into the room. "You're gonna have to tell me how good I'm looking," he said. "Tell me the truth—are my teeth too perfectly pearly and white? Would a female be scared she wouldn't be good enough for me?—What am I saying? They'd _all_ worry!"

Lister shook his head. "Ask Rimmer," he said disinterestedly. He tried to see how well his cornflakes were faring in the madras sauce; "I _always_ think you're dazzling."

"Where is he?"

"Over on the bunk," Lister answered.

"Go on; tell me!" the Cat urged the hologram. He made his way to the bunk. "I thought this was one of my sexiest outfits—but it's hard to tell that without the lights on. 'Course, even if you're _blind_ you should be able to sense the sheer magnetism of—hey," the Cat said, atypically interrupting his discourse about his favorite subject: himself. "Where _is_ goalpost head?"

"He's right in front of you."

"No, he isn't!"

Lister turned around. "Yes, he is; he was just—" Lister strained his eyes in the darkness. No… no Rimmer-like forms there. Instinctively, he felt under the table; no, in the crisis, the hologram hadn't taken refuge under there, either. Then he shook his head. He wouldn't know for sure, would he? He couldn't touch Rimmer, anyway. "Hey, Holly—where's Rimmer?"

"He's right there," Holly said.

"Holly," Lister countered with just a touch of annoyance in his voice, "he's not over here, and he's not over there. He isn't anywhere!"

"According to all the available data, Arnold Rimmer is sitting on his bunk." Holly electronically sniffed in offense.

"Well, then, why can't we see 'im?"

"Gee, I dunno," she said with a bit of sarcasm, "maybe it has something to do with the lights being out."

"But you said they _weren't_ out!" Lister replied. The lights flickered again.

"Hey!" Cat exclaimed suddenly, "here he is!"

Lister looked. Sure enough, there was Rimmer, sitting on his bunk—and then, as the lights flickered again, he was gone. When the lights came on, albeit dimly, Rimmer re-appeared, rather translucently, and still gibbering, but this time Lister couldn't make out any of the words. "Buhzitzka, slubbadivvabit," he said to no one in particular.

"What's he sayin'?" Cat asked. The lights flickered. Rimmer disappeared again.

Lister shrugged a guess. "Goodbye?"


	2. Chapter 2

Lister hopped down from his upper bunk and was surprised to find that Rimmer was still in his own down below. "Hey, Rimmer, didn't you get up at eight o'clock for your usual five-thirty jog around the ship?" he teased.

The bundle of blanket moved a little bit but ignored him.

Lister threw a sideways glance back at the bunk as he pulled on his trousers. "Rimmer, it's nearly nine-thirty; you'll miss your seven o'clock revision!" he pressed.

"Nnnnnnnn," came the blanket.

Lister pulled off his tee-shirt and put it back on inside out, brushing it off. Then he went back to the bunk and playfully shoved the moaning lump. "Rimmer," he sang at it.

"Go 'way," the blanket snapped.

Lister backed up, mockingly surprised. "What's the matter with _you_?" he asked.

"Leave me alone."

"Yes, _sir_, Mr. Rimmer _sir_."

Lister spun back to the table and yawned hugely as Kryten came into the room, wheeling in a trolley full of food. "Good morning, Mr. Lister, sir," the mechanoid greeted.

"Good morning, Kryten."

"Mr. Rimmer, sir," Kryten continued.

A groan from the blanket.

"Sir?"

"Don't bother with _'im_, Kryten," Lister advised, sitting down and rubbing his hands together, looking like a lion anticipating devouring a small cow. "He's doing all his _revising_ today from under his blanket."

Kryten looked back and forth between the table and Rimmer's bunk. "Oh, surely _not_, sir." He shook his head and let his logical, illogically Canadian-accented voice wash over the buried hologram. "The instability of the mattress and the darkness of the space under the blanket would make a less than ideal place to calculate the path required to navigate through a meteor storm with particles larger than a construction worker's lunchbox. Or what about how to change direction when traveling just under the speed of light without having to drive all the way to the next galaxy before you complete the U-turn?" The android leaned down over the Rimmer-shaped blob. "Please, sir, take my word for it: you're not _stable_."

Rimmer didn't move. "Forget about him, Kryten. Did you find out anything about what happened yesterday with the lights?"

Kryten moved away from the bunk. "I had the skutters go through all main wiring units, and Holly has scanned all her flight recording databanks. Nothing appears. It's almost as if nothing actually happened. But something quite clearly _did_ go wrong. I've asked Holly to stop the ship and conduct a scan of the entire surrounding area to see of she can detect anything that might be affecting our own power supply."

"But it wasn't _all_ the power, was it?" Lister said. "I mean, Holly was still there, even if we couldn't see 'er; the ship didn't stop moving."

"That's right. It was just the lights."

"And Rimmer," Lister added, tossing a sardonic look in the hologram's lumpy-blanketed direction.

"Well, Mr. Rimmer is made of light, sir. Except for the small physical presence of his light bee, he's all flash and no substance."

Lister's face lit up like a Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center. "All _flash_ and no _substance_!" he repeated gleefully. He went back to the bunk and knocked on Rimmer's blanket. "D'ja hear _that_, Rimmer? Kryten says you're all flash and no—" He started to peel back the protective covering over his bunkmate when the lights flashed on and off again. Rimmer groaned and Lister felt the blanket pull away from him.

"There it goes again!" Lister exclaimed. He pulled a lighter out of his pocket and flicked it on as darkness descended again, lowering it toward where his other hand was still holding Rimmer's blanket. He tried to pull the material away. Rimmer was holding fast, but Lister pulled harder and the blanket almost flew off the bed. Then Lister's eyes grew as big as soft-boiled eggs when all he could see was Rimmer's light bee. "Kryten, what's going on?"

"I don't know, sir," Kryten replied. "It's quite extraordinary!"

"Rimmer, can you hear me?" Lister asked, his voice raising up an octave in astonishment as his eyebrows migrated up his forehead.

But no sound came from the hologram, whose light bee dropped from its strangely suspended state to the mattress below it, and the blanket drooped.

"Holly! What happened?" Lister squeaked.

"I don't know," the computer admitted from its dark screen. "I can't see very well from here, after all."

"Holly," Lister insisted, "Rimmer's gone!"

"Hey, that sounds like something to celebrate!" came another voice.

Lister moved his lighter to aim its tiny flame of light toward the sound. "Cat, we don't know what's happening. Rimmer's just disappeared; we can only see his light bee!"

"Well, then, quick—let's hide before he comes back and figures out where we've gone!"

The lights in their quarters came on, then off, then on again. A Rimmer with as much substance as Paris Hilton's personality appeared. He was lying on his stomach on the bunk, his jaw slack, his eyes closed. He looked exhausted.

"Hey, Rimmer," Lister said, "you okay?"

Rimmer said something but no one could hear anything. "What's that, Rimmer?" Lister asked. Again, Rimmer spoke, but no sounds came out. Then he faded again and came back, but still they could see through him. "Holly?"

The computer, now visible on the screen, strained to see past them to the bunk. "Well, if you'd get out of the way it might help a little," she said. "Oh. Right. Well, he's not all here, is he?"

"I got that impression _before_ the lights went out!" the Cat declared.

Lister ignored him. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, not all of him is on board the ship yet."

"Of course!" Kryten suddenly understood. "When the lights went out, Mr. Rimmer disappeared from our sight. His body has come back—mostly, but the rest of him has not. We'll just have to wait for him to come back completely."

"Well, how long will that _take_?" Lister asked.

"I'm not sure," Kryten replied. "The last time, he came back right away. But this time…"

His voice trailed off as he looked back at the bunk. Cat came forward and glanced, disinterested, at the hologram whose mouth was moving like a goldfish that'd jumped out of its aquarium. "I think I like him better this way," he observed. Then he moved toward the table. "What are you getting me for breakfast?"

"…utha funnutha…" Rimmer seemed to whisper. Lister furrowed his brow and leaned in to try and make something out. Rimmer's body seemed to be filling out. But he hadn't moved, or even opened his eyes. "Munnudda. Uthuvva hussuvva…"

"What's that you're saying, Rimmer?" Lister encouraged.

"He's sayin', 'Why are you letting your little kitty go _hungry_ today?'" the Cat said from the table, where he had sat down and was now studiously ignoring everything else happening around him. "I'm waitin' for my _food_, remember?"

"Rimmer," Lister said, moving in closer, "what's going on?"

Finally, Rimmer's light projection was complete, and the others could no longer see through him—physically, anyway. "I don't… feel well," he managed to say. Then he went limp and seemed to fall asleep.

Lister lowered the blanket. "I don't get it, Kryten. Whatever it is that's affecting our lights, is affecting the ship's projection unit as well. If we don't find out what's doing this, one day Rimmer might disappear and not come back at all!"

"Who's for leaving it broken?" the Cat volunteered.

Lister and Kryten shot him scornful looks. "I'll work on it again right away, sir," Kryten said. "Holly, I'll meet you in the Operations Room."

"Right," agreed the computer.

"_Bon appetit_, sirs," Kryten said with a nod toward the food trolley as he headed out the door.

Lister shook his head and glanced back at the bunk as he grabbed a sausage off the trolley. He sat down at the table with Cat. "There's just one thing I've never understood," he said.

"What's that?" Cat asked.

"How the smeg can Rimmer ever touch his blanket?"


	3. Chapter 3

Who owns _Red Dwarf_? Not me. No, really. I don't. Sorry.

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Arnold just couldn't get a break. Dead for three million years. Revived on a mining ship that was so far into deep space that the idea of getting home had as much chance of becoming reality as, let's face it, Posh Spice suddenly gaining a hundred pounds and becoming a spokesperson for Overeaters Anonymous. His bunkmate was the man whose greatest pleasure had seemed to come from sticking live snakes in Rimmer's bed and changing all the figures on his slide rule; who laced Rimmer's hair gel with hair removal cream, so that when Rimmer slicked his locks back one day in an attempt to impress a woman, he ended up with a reverse Mohawk. And who else was on board to restore his sanity? A creature that had evolved from the ship's cat—with twice the annoyance factor and one-fifth the brains of a TV lottery girl; and a mechanoid with a head shaped like a mutated cotton ear bud and a voice that even Top-40 disk jockeys would find irritating, not to mention a particularly exasperating grasp of all Space Corps directives, right down to the very obscure Directive 2475381-stroke-F: when water is running low on a ship in transit between planets, all members of the crew must limit their toilet-breaks to one group outing at the end of the day in order to save water on the flush. Well, okay, Rimmer conceded: he had to admit he'd taken pleasure in Kryten's knowledge of _that_ little tidbit: Lister and the Cat had walked around with their legs crossed for two weeks. He'd never seen them look so relieved as when they'd finally found that little asteroid with the S-3 atmosphere.

He couldn't touch anything—well, anything that Holly hadn't created hologramatically for him, but that was cheating, really, wasn't it? He couldn't fondle or caress anything—like a woman's breast. Not that he'd really had much opportunity to do that when he was alive, but who was to say that it couldn't have happened later on if he was given half a chance? Even Inflatable Rachel was out of his sights now, and after he'd gone through all the trouble of buying her a peephole bra and matching knickers, too.

And up to now, he couldn't feel anything. No cold, no heat, no pain. There had been good points to that, indeedy. But not now. Now, that was gone. He was feeling, all right. He was feeling miserable. His stomach hurt, he had a headache, and he was achy all over. It was the way he felt every time he took an astro-navigation exam that he knew he had failed. He knew that feeling well; he'd had it eleven times. Only then, it had all been in his mind. Now, for some reason, it was all real.

He didn't bother to raise his head as Kryten puttered around the Medibay, chattering like a chipmunk and trying to figure out what was happening. He might well not even have been there for all the attention Kryten was paying him. Finally, when he was almost ready to drop back to sleep, the mechanoid addressed him.

"Thank you for your patience, sir," Kryten said. "I've gone through everything thoroughly now, and I am confident that I'm reaching the right conclusion."

Rimmer's eyebrows met down near his eyes. "Which is?" he asked, worried.

Kryten's big black shoulders raised up in a shrug. "I don't know."

"What? But you just said—"

"What I said, sir, was that I've examined everything thoroughly. Unfortunately, I did not get any results."

"Well, _that's_ good news," Rimmer said sarcastically. "So I suppose that means I'm just going to keep fading in and out every time we blow a bulb?"

"I'm not sure about that, sir. At the moment, all I know is that until Holly discovers what's happening with our lights… well, you'd better not plan to watch _Lord of the Rings _all in one sitting, sir."

"Well, what about the way I _feel_?" Rimmer persisted. "I thought I wasn't supposed to be able to get sick. I feel like I've just done the horizontal mambo with a baboon after eating one of Lister's curry and cheese puff sandwiches!"

"That _is_ sick, sir," Kryten admitted. "I'll get Holly to give you some hologramatic aspirin and give you a stomach pump just to be on the safe side. I'm afraid all I can do is keep trying to find out what's going on."

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"So where do you go when you fade away?" Lister asked. "I mean, do you see anything? Hear anything? Or do you just… cease to exist?"

The thought of _ceasing to exist_ scared Rimmer. Even though he technically didn't exist already, by being dead, the thought of being _dead_ dead just didn't appeal to him. Not at all. "Wouldn't you like _that_?" he retorted from his bunk, hoping to cover up his fear. "'Whoops, lights out again. Bye-bye, Rimsy!—Listen, don't bother to fix that bulb, will you, Holly?'"

Lister shook his head, bemused, and hopped onto his own bunk.

"It's hard to explain, Lister. I can see—sort of. And I can hear—sort of. But I don't think I'm seeing and hearing anything on _Red Dwarf_."

"So what _are_ you seeing and hearing?" Lister asked.

Rimmer screwed up his face. "I'm not sure. It's all quite indistinct. But I can tell you one thing: it's certainly very strange."

"Kryten says you _feel_ stuff," Lister said.

"I do," the hologram confirmed ruefully. "It's like being hung over and beaten up after eating one too many greasy hamburgers from a roadside service station restaurant with a name like 'Joe's Eats' and then finding a half a centipede in the wrapper." He sat up, queasy just thinking about it. "You pile on the tomato sauce, hoping to disguise the flavor, and suddenly you're kneeling in front of a porcelain bowl with your stomach doing cartwheels and praying that you don't actually see any big chunks of carrot come out with your shoes."

Lister frowned distastefully. "Man, I hate it when that happens," he remarked.

"And on top of all that, Holly has no idea what the smeg is going on, so I could be going through this for decades!"

"I feel your pain, man."

"No, you don't," Rimmer commented. "But I wish you _did_."

Holly's face appeared on the screen nearby. "I think you two had better get down to the Science Room," she suggested.

"What's up, Hol?" Lister asked.

"Well, I don't want to alarm you," the computer replied, "but there's a big swirly orange and blue thing about ten-and-a-half clicks away, and it's getting closer."

"What is it?" asked Rimmer.

"I'm not sure."

"Is it dangerous, Holly?" asked Lister, hopping down from his bunk.

"At the moment all I can tell you is that it'll clash with the décor in the cockpit, and with the outfit that the Cat's wearing. If you're asking me if it's capable of turning the ship into a jar of mint jelly, I'll have to have more to work with."

"Like what?"

"Well, a note telling me what it is would be handy."

Rimmer stood up carefully and headed to the door. "We're going to die."

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"What is that?" Lister asked. Rimmer came in behind him and the two of them stared, mesmerized, at a large, angry-looking mass on the screen above their heads.

Kryten and the Cat had already arrived. "I'll tell you what it is: it's a fashion killer, that's what it is. Look at those colors—none of that goes with this lovely peach and avocado outfit!" the Cat complained. "I designed these clothes specifically for a non-swirly-thing day, and then in comes this mess in those unfashionable colors to make my life a misery! Holly, make it go away!"

"No chance of that," Lister said, watching the console lights flashing and numbers changing. "It's moving closer and faster every second."

"Man, that means I'm gonna have to change my clothes. Excuse me while I go make sure _someone_ around here can coordinate colors!"

The Cat turned to leave when the lights flashed again. Everything went black, only this time longer, and somehow feeling blacker, than any time before.

Rimmer started to protest. "Oh, no, not aga—"

Rimmer's voice cut off. "Rimmer?" Lister called into the darkness. "Rimmer—you there?"

But all the others heard was a couple of what could have been calls for help, and then nothing.


End file.
